Drawing from every stage of the Nobel laureate's career, Derek Walcott's Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including A Far Cry from Africa and A City's Death by Fire, with passages from the celebrated Omeros and selections from his latest major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the contemporary long poem. Here we find all of Walcott's essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean's colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, language, and metaphor. Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott's breadth of work, spanning almost half a century.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 12/26/2007
ISBN: 9780374531119
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 0.90d

Review Citations: New York Times Book Review 01/20/2008 pg. 24